Hi,

We have some software which automatically sets up groups and users for people to simplify account management due to having a large number of servers. Out of about 1000 servers in our datacenters, 2 of them won't let us add groups or users that contain capital letters. They are both RedHat ES 3. We have lots of other CentOS 3 servers (based on RHES3) which do let us add users/groups with capital letters just fine. I'm pretty sure we even have other RHES3 servers which are ok but I'd have to check. This has not been a problem yet on any RHES4 or CentOS4 servers. These 2 problem servers are not using any sort of network logins, all just local accounts.

I realize we could manually add things all lowercase then edit the files in /etc manually to stick in the uppercase letters, but surely there is an easier way. We can't manually be doing that since our software adds new employees automatically etc.

I looked in /etc/login.defs but didn't see anything related to allowing uppercase letters. Where is the setting that controls this?


useradd: invalid user name 'TestUser123'

groupadd: TestGroup123 is a not a valid group name

You could use adduser instead of useradd. It allows a --force-badname option.

Also, I'd make sure this isn't some kinda fixed bug by checking for updates to the shadow-utils package (or whichever package contains the useradd binary). This might be the reason why some of your RHES3 boxes do take uppercase. It's just a thought.